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As this contains a lot of rather outlandish-sounding claims, it's referenced far more heavily than usual, and citations are immediately next to the point being referenced, rather than at the ends of sentences/paragraphs. – iridescent10:32, 4 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The numbers (like eating his own weight of food a day) sound like another Mary Toft. Are there any modern evaluations if such gluttony is physically possible? Can a digestive system actually move food so quickly and relentlessly? East of Borschov (talk) 18:33, 4 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
What you believe or don't believe is immaterial. Wikipedia is a tertiary source, and thus we report what the sources say. In this case, they're unequivocal.[1][2] – iridescent18:39, 4 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You jump to conclusions on other people's beliefs too early. After reading the article I struggle to make myself believe that my doctors did not borrow their unequivocal wisdom from the 1819 journals :)) East of Borschov (talk) 18:51, 4 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Not clear what point you're trying to make. I'm quite sure that they're all drawing from Percy's 1819 paper. I'm also aware that Percy was one of the leading surgeons in the French military and a leading writer in French medicine, and is impeccable as a source. – iridescent18:54, 4 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I suppose I'm more credulous than many, but I don't find this article unbelievable at all. (The "Did You Know..." blurb seemed far less believable, but that was because it didn't include the details.) It sounds like this poor bastard had a serious fault in his digestive system which prevented him from absorbing food properly; the stuff was just passing through him. Too bad that the nature of his problem is never properly explained. --Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 17:25, 10 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
It was almost certainly some kind of fault in his digestive system, and he was forced to scavenge garbage and perform in the eighteenth century equivalent of geek shows to survive; France in this post-revolution period wasn't the modern welfare-state of today or even the vicious but ruthlessly efficient state built by Napoleon, but a country under total embargo by the Royal Navy, at war with most of its neighbours, and ripping itself apart internally through civil war. Whatever he was suffering from, while there aren't any recent cases I'm aware of there are certainly other well-documented cases from history; Tarrare's contemporary, the Polish soldier Charles Domery, appears to have suffered from the same condition, and relatively detailed records survive of his diet, appearance and behavior following his capture and internment by the British. However, none of the sources have anything more than the vaguest speculation as to the cause. The fact that neither high-dose laxatives (compressed tobacco, vinegar) nor medication to induce constipation (laudanum, high dosages of boiled eggs) appear to have any effect strongly implies that his digestive tract wasn't absorbing nutrition correctly, but nowhere does anyone actually say so. – iridescent17:10, 11 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The book referenced in the preceding post also tells us of a man who lived to be 169 years old, so I don't think we are obliged to consider that particular source even remotely reliable.
